Choose on-premise video automation when your data, your After Effects craft, and your volume all belong inside your own walls. Choose cloud rendering when you want someone else to run the machines and you can live with their template tools. Both are honest answers, and the right one depends on a handful of facts about your team that you can check in an afternoon.
We build Templater, an After Effects plugin, so we are not neutral. Our software runs on machines you control, inside the copy of After Effects you already use. We think that is the better design for a lot of teams, and we say why below. We also say where a cloud platform is the smarter call, because pretending otherwise would waste your time. This guide walks through five questions in order: who controls the data, what the cost looks like over time, how fast the work gets done, who looks after what, and when cloud wins outright.
One clarification first, because the two words get used loosely. On-premise means the rendering happens on hardware you own or control, whether that is a workstation under a desk or a rack of machines in your facility. Cloud means a vendor runs the rendering for you on their infrastructure, and your template, your data, and your finished video pass through their systems. The line is blurrier than it sounds, and we come back to that, because Dataclay has a few pieces that live in the cloud and a path to run Templater on cloud machines of your own.
Where the work happens, and who sees your data
The first question is the simplest to state and the hardest to reverse later. When a video is rendered, where are your assets, and who else can see them?
With Templater, the answer is short. You rig a template inside After Effects, point it at a data source, and the render happens in After Effects on your machine. Projector, our app for rendering several videos at once and delivering them, was designed from the beginning as a local desktop application. Our description of it is direct: it renders your videos on your machine, and your assets, in transit and at rest, are never visible to another party, including us. That is a strong statement and we mean it as a design fact, not a slogan. There is no step where your footage is uploaded to a render farm, because there is no render farm in the loop.
Cloud platforms work the other way, and they say so plainly. Plainly describes its rendering this way on its own homepage: it uses a cloud-based After Effects infrastructure to render your videos. You upload your After Effects templates, connect a data source, and the videos render and distribute automatically. Creatomate and Shotstack are also cloud services, reached through a REST API or a no-code tool. That means your template and your data travel to their servers by design. For plenty of work, that is fine. A public product feed turned into social clips is not a secret.
The question gets sharper when the data is not public. Consider a regional sports network that wants a personalized recap video for each season-ticket holder, with the fan’s name and seat history in it. Or a company producing onboarding videos with employee names and department details. Or a school making progress videos with student information. The footage may be harmless, but the data attached to it is exactly the kind a security team asks about. When the render stays on your own network, the review is short, because the answer to “where does the data go” is “nowhere.” When it goes to a vendor, someone has to read the vendor’s security documentation, and your answer is only as good as theirs.
We should be precise about where Dataclay itself is and is not local. Templater and Projector run on your machines. QUE, our JSON-based data source and job manager, is a cloud-based app. We describe it as security conscious from the ground up, with end-to-end encryption and field-level masking where appropriate, and decryption only when an authorized client requests the data. In a QUE setup, your jobs live in QUE, and the computers that actually process them, which we call satellites, are machines of yours running After Effects and Templater. So the rendering and the footage stay local, and the job data is held in QUE. If even that is too much for your policy, Templater reads from other sources too, including a JSON file, a tab-delimited file, or a Google Sheet, so you choose how much of the data picture is cloud and how much is not.
There is another kind of control that people forget to ask about, which is control over the runtime. A render you own is a render you can inspect. Templater keeps log files so you can see what it is doing at any moment, and the command line interface lets a developer drive the same processes from an existing pipeline. When a job misbehaves, you are looking at your own machine, not filing a ticket and waiting. Our own blog post on this topic makes a related point about ownership: keeping both your media library and your render process on your local network lets you retain complete control over your assets and the metadata attached to them, which matters for long-term archiving and portability. We wrote that post alongside a media asset management partner, and it argues for on-premise deployment in the strongest terms we have. You can read it in The Primacy of On-Prem for Automated Video Production and Management. Note one line in it that we think is honest: both companies offer options for deploying in the cloud, and the post says so up front.
The takeaway for this section is a test you can run today. List what goes into one video: the footage, the fonts, the data fields, the output. Mark each item as public, internal, or restricted. If anything is restricted, ask what your policy says about it leaving your network. If the answer is that it cannot, cloud rendering is off the table for that work, and the decision is already made.
What it costs over time, and what you are buying
We are not going to quote any prices here, and we do not quote anyone else’s. Competitor numbers change, and ours live on our licensing page. What we can describe honestly is the shape of the cost, because the shapes are different and the shape often matters more than the number.
With on-premise automation, you are buying software to run on hardware you already have or plan to buy. Templater licenses come in a few forms. A Standard License is activated on one machine at a time. A Floating License can be used by any number of computers on a network connected to a licensing server, though only one system can use it at a time. There are subscriptions, and there is also a one-month license for short projects. We explain the options in our Templater licensing guide. Our FAQ says that Templater subscriptions give unlimited output capacity, which means the cost does not rise with each additional video you render. If you make a great many videos, that is the point. Past the license, each extra render draws on machine time you already own.
There is also QUE Meter, which draws on a pool of credits rather than a subscription, and it carries a trade-off you should know about. A computer using Templater with QUE Meter must always be connected to the internet so that usage can be counted. Traditional Pro and Bot subscriptions do not need that constant connection. We also state that once a user passes 1,000 outputs in a single month, a QUE subscription becomes the more affordable option. So even inside our own product line, metered and unlimited are different shapes, and you pick based on volume.
Cloud platforms usually price by usage. Plainly’s plans include a set number of rendering minutes, which means there is no limit on the number of videos, but output is capped by those minutes, and how many renders can run at the same time depends on the plan. Creatomate offers a free trial of 50 credits with no card required, and its other pricing sits on its pricing page. Shotstack offers a free sandbox with no card and puts paid pricing on its pricing page. We are not going to guess at what any of that adds up to for you. See their pricing pages and do the arithmetic with your own volume.
What the shapes imply is straightforward. A usage-priced service has a low cost to start and a cost that tracks your output. That works well when your output is small or lumpy, because you pay for what you use and nothing when you are idle. It is less comfortable when your output is large and steady, because the bill follows the volume upward. A license on your own hardware has a different profile. You pay up front or on a subscription, you carry the cost of the machines and the After Effects seats, and then more output costs very little extra. That suits steady, heavy volume, and it is a poor fit for a team that makes five videos a quarter.
One cost belongs on the on-premise side of the ledger, and we would be dishonest to bury it. Templater needs Adobe After Effects. You need a licensed copy on every machine that renders. If you already have motion designers working in After Effects, you probably have those seats. If you do not, add that to your estimate. A cloud platform that builds templates in its own editor, as Creatomate does, does not ask you to buy or learn After Effects at all.
A good way to think about it is to count your videos per month in a normal month and in your biggest month. If both numbers are small, usage pricing will probably win. If both are large, the license shape tends to win. If your normal month is small and your biggest month is enormous, a campaign launch for example, you have a real decision, and we cover that in the last section.
Speed, and who keeps the machines running
Speed gets marketed hard on both sides, so here is what we can support. Render time depends on the average length of the videos, the output resolution, your hardware, the ratio of dynamic to static frames, how heavy the effects are, and how you build the template. That is our own list from our FAQ, and it applies whether the machine is under your desk or in a data center. Cloud does not repeal it.
What changes is how you add capacity. On-premise, you add capacity in three ways. First, Projector renders several customized videos at the same time on one machine, using the After Effects rendering engine in parallel based on the number of cores. A machine with eight cores renders eight videos at once. Second, you can run Templater Bot on several machines in parallel, and the arithmetic is simple: two machines cut the total production time in half, three cut it to a third, and so on. Third, you can run Templater on one or more Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services, which pushes you past the limits of a desktop. No special Templater license is needed to do that. After Effects does need to be installed and running in that cloud environment, though, and Adobe’s standard license agreement does not permit After Effects on a server, so you have to speak to an Adobe salesperson about the right license. We say this plainly in our FAQ because people trip on it.
That third option matters for this whole decision. On-premise versus cloud is not a wall. You can run our software on machines you rent. What you give up is the simplicity of a service that handles the machines for you, and what you keep is After Effects running as After Effects, with your own plugins, fonts, and project structure. We also note that QUE does not offer load balancing of jobs between satellites at this time. You can assign jobs to specific satellites by hand, but you have to make sure every font, plugin, and asset the job needs is installed or available on that satellite. Cloud services built around a managed pool of renderers may handle that differently, and their homepages are where to read how.
For a feel of the day-to-day, take a concrete case. A retail team has a product feed and wants a short video for every item before a fixed launch date. They rig one After Effects template with Templater, point it at the feed, and render one representative video on a machine that matches their production hardware. They multiply that time by the number of products. That is our recommended pre-flight, and it gives a fair estimate for a sequential queue. If the total runs past the launch date, they have two honest choices. They can simplify the template so each render is shorter, or they can add machines. Our post on speeding up After Effects exports covers the simplification side, and our explainer on batch rendering in After Effects covers how the batch itself is built. The point is that the team can do this math before spending anything, with their own machine and their own template.
Now the other half of this section, which is maintenance. Who fixes it when it breaks? On-premise, the answer is you, with our help. That is a real cost, and the list is worth reading before you commit. You install Templater, and the installer has to match your After Effects version. Because Adobe changed its API, users on After Effects 2020 or earlier need the Legacy installer. Activation needs to reach our licensing server, and antivirus or firewall software can block it. If a machine has no internet access, Templater can be activated through our Offline Activation process, which is useful for locked-down networks. After an update you may need to reset your After Effects preferences. When a render fails with the “Failed at N/A” error, it usually means files, footage, or fonts moved from where the project expected them to be, and fixing that is on you. None of these are exotic, and each has an answer in our documentation, but they are yours to handle.
Support is the other half of the picture. Dataclay offers responsive support to all Templater users at no charge, and for teams running mission-critical work we sell premium support packages. If your team lacks the people to build a front end or write scripts, our custom development team can help. Compare that to a cloud service, where the vendor runs the rendering infrastructure and you are spared much of the machine care. Plainly’s homepage says its platform scans your After Effects project and detects parameters automatically, and an After Effects plugin can upload templates directly. That removes a chunk of setup effort. We are not saying cloud is hands-off, only that the machines are not your problem, and for small teams without technical staff that can be the deciding factor.
Our suggestion is to be honest about who in your organization will be the person that fixes a stuck render at the worst possible moment. If that person exists, and likes the job, on-premise is manageable. If that person would be you, in addition to your actual job, take the cloud option seriously.
When cloud is the better call
There are situations where we would tell a friend to use a cloud platform, and we would rather say so than lose your trust. Here are the clearest ones.
The first is a team that does not use After Effects. Creatomate builds templates in its own online Template Editor, and its homepage does not mention After Effects. Shotstack designs templates visually and turns them into code, and its homepage does not mention After Effects either. If your designers live in a browser and your developers want to call an API, those platforms fit how you already work. Templater is an After Effects plugin. If nobody on your team opens After Effects, asking them to start is a poor trade.
The second is a product that needs a video feature built in. Creatomate describes itself as a creative automation platform for developers and no-code users, with a REST API that takes a template ID and a set of modifications. Shotstack offers a cloud video editing API and a white-label editor SDK you can embed and brand, with SDKs in Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby. If you are building an app where your customers edit or generate video inside your own interface, that is what those tools were made to do. Our own tools can also be driven by code, since Templater Bot has a command line interface and QUE has an API, so a developer can build on ours too. But it is a different starting point, and a team that wants everything hosted will find the cloud services closer to what they are picturing.
The third is a small or uneven workload with no appetite for hardware. If you make a few videos a month, or your output arrives in rare bursts, paying for usage and owning nothing may simply make more sense. Both Creatomate and Shotstack offer a free way to start, and Plainly offers a 14-day free trial. Trying a service costs you little. We also offer a 30-day free trial of Templater, which is a fully featured version of Bot, so you can compare on your own template and not on anyone’s promises.
The fourth is a team that wants integrations through no-code tools. Creatomate lists no-code automation with 10,000 apps and guides for Zapier, Make, Pabbly, and n8n, with Airtable shown as a trigger. Plainly lists CSV, its API, native one-click integrations, and a Google Sheets solution. We have a Zapier connection of our own through QUE, which reaches more than 5,000 apps, and our blog covers it in Zapier connects QUE to software you love. Still, if no-code integrations are your first requirement, check each vendor’s integration list against your tools before deciding.
The fifth is simple. If your team has no appetite for maintaining render machines, and your data is not sensitive, the maintenance list in the previous section is a cost you can avoid. A vendor that says it runs the After Effects rendering infrastructure for you is selling you that relief.
Plainly is worth a closer look for one specific profile. If your team already builds templates in After Effects and wants the cloud to do the rendering, Plainly’s homepage describes exactly that, an upload of After Effects templates, a data source, and automatic rendering and distribution. For a team in that spot, it is the closest match to the cloud version of what we do, and the choice between us comes down to the questions in this guide. Where does the data go, how does the cost scale, and who runs the machines. We would rather you ask those questions than pick on our word.
Where on-premise earns its place is in the opposite profile. You have After Effects designers whose craft you want to keep intact. You have data that should not leave your network. You have steady, heavy volume, so a cost that does not climb with every render helps you. You have someone who can look after the machines, or you are willing to buy support to cover that gap. And you may want the freedom to scale by adding machines of your own, or by renting Windows Server instances, rather than by moving your pipeline onto a vendor’s platform. If that sounds like you, start with Templater, add QUE when your data outgrows a spreadsheet, and use Projector when you want parallel rendering and automated delivery. Our Learn section and our post on making hundreds of personalized videos from data show what that looks like in practice.
The bottom line is short. If the data is sensitive, the volume is steady and high, and you already live in After Effects, run it on your own machines and accept the maintenance as the price of control. If your team works in a browser, your volume is small or bursty, or you want a video feature inside your own product, a cloud platform will get you running sooner with less to look after. Then test whichever one you lean toward with one real video before you commit. A single render on your own template will tell you more than any comparison page, including this one.
Still weighing the two? These are the questions teams ask us most when they are deciding where their renders should run.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Templater render in the cloud instead of on my own machines?
Yes. You can run Templater on one or more Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services, which lets you scale past what a desktop can do. Dataclay does not require a special Templater license for this. Templater does need Adobe After Effects installed and running in that environment, and Adobe’s standard license agreement does not permit After Effects on a server, so you need to speak with an Adobe salesperson about the right license before you start.
Does my footage leave my network when I use Templater and Projector?
Not for rendering. Projector was conceived as a local desktop application, and it renders your videos on your machine. Your assets, both in transit and at rest, are never visible to another party, including Dataclay. QUE, our job and data manager, is a cloud-based app, so if you use it, the job data is held there while the satellites that process it are your own computers. You can also use a Google Sheet, a tab-delimited file, or a JSON file as the data source instead.
How does the cost of on-premise video automation compare with a cloud service?
The shapes differ. A cloud platform such as Plainly includes a set number of rendering minutes in each plan, so output follows what you use. A Templater subscription gives unlimited output capacity, and you supply the machines and the After Effects seats. Low or uneven volume tends to favor paying for usage. Steady, high volume tends to favor the license. We list no prices here, so see our licensing page and each competitor’s pricing page, then run the math with your own monthly count.
Do I need Adobe After Effects to automate video on-premise with Dataclay?
Yes. Templater is a plugin that runs inside Adobe After Effects, so every machine that renders needs a licensed copy of After Effects. If your designers already work in it, you likely have the seats. If nobody on your team uses After Effects, a cloud service with its own online template editor, such as Creatomate, may be a better fit, since its homepage does not mention After Effects.
Who maintains the render machines if I go on-premise?
You do, with our support behind you. That means matching the Templater installer to your After Effects version, handling activation when antivirus or firewall software blocks it, keeping fonts, plugins, and assets in place on every machine, and fixing errors such as Failed at N/A when files move. Dataclay gives all Templater users responsive support free of charge, and we sell premium support packages and custom development for teams that want more coverage.
How do I estimate render time before choosing on-premise or cloud?
Render one video that looks like the rest of your set on a machine comparable to your production machine. Multiply that time by the number of videos, which gives a fair estimate for a sequential queue. Running Templater Bot on several machines in parallel divides the total, so two machines take half the time and three take a third. Projector also renders several videos at once on one machine, based on the number of cores. Cloud services have their own limits, such as plan-based concurrency at Plainly.
Can I try on-premise automation before buying?
Yes. Templater has a free 30-day trial that is a fully featured version of Bot, so it shows every button, including ones a Rig license will not have. If you buy and realize Templater does not work for you, contact us within 30 days for a refund. Trying a cloud service first is also reasonable, since Plainly offers a 14-day free trial, Creatomate a free trial of 50 credits, and Shotstack a free sandbox.
